John Millington Synge

J.M. Synge was a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance, a poetic dramatist of great power who portrayed the harsh rural conditions of the Aran Islands and the western Irish seaboard with sophisticated craftsmanship. He was born on 16 April 1871, in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, Ireland, the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents. He studied at Trinity College and at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, and then pursued further studies in Germany, Italy, and France. He met William Butler Yeats while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1896. Yeats inspired him with enthusiasm for the Irish renaissance and advised him to go to the Aran Islands and draw material from life. Synge lived in the islands during part of each year (1898–1902), observing the people and learning their language, recording his impressions in The Aran Islands (1907) and basing his one-act plays In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904) on islanders’ stories. His other major works include The Well of the Saints (1905), The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910). Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was untreatable at the time. He died aged 37 on 24 March 1909, in Dublin, Ireland. Although he left relatively few works, they are widely regarded as of high cultural significance and have influenced many modern Irish writers.